10 Bad Films By Great Directors

10. David Fincher - Fight Club

David Fincher has made half-a-dozen or so great films, a few solid ones and three masterpieces (Zodiac, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - seriously - and The Social Network). Fight Club, perhaps his most well-known and well-revered film, falls into none of these categories, instead sitting next to Alien 3 (his first film) on his list of misconceived efforts.

This is not a popular opinion, and the film regularly appears on those Greatest Films of the 90s lists. But Fight Club is bad in spite of itself, a film so doused in macho-porn nihilism that it ends up glossing over its great look and cast to become a stylish but ultimately cold affair.

There are some fine moments, and the first act is actually pretty damn good, but this is rendered immaterial by what follows, as Fincher dumps the wit and ups the machismo, turning Fight Club into little more than a glossy catalogue of things men supposedly like: violence, destruction and empty sex. The film, like the Chuck Palahniuk novel it's based on, tries to say pressing things about materialism and man's bestial nature, but in the end it only serves to endorse them, becoming product placement for the things it warns against in the process.